Known web printers and known web printing operations can cause a large amount of web substrate and time to be wasted when the web substrate is changed between print operations. For example when changing the colour, weight or texture of paper that is to be printed upon. Short print runs, with frequent changes of web substrate between print runs, increase this waste and thus bring this issue to the fore.
Web printers have a bonding area in the printer where the web substrate of the next substrate to be printed upon is spliced to the web substrate of the previous substrate, and an image transfer area where ink is applied to the substrate. There is often a relatively long length of web between the bonding area and the image transfer area. Web substrate is manually threaded through the printer between the bonding area and the image transfer area after a first print operation has been performed on a first substrate and before a second print operation is performed on a second substrate, in order to bring the second substrate to the image transfer area.